Michael Cera and Gaby Hoffman on Crystal Fairy, Acting on Mescaline, and Trips with Strangers

At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Michael Cera and Gaby Hoffman impressed critics by each playing against type in the drug-fueled indie drama Crystal Fairy. For Cera, that meant portraying an abrasively obnoxious American fiending for one specific form of mescaline while vacationing in Chile. And for Hoffman, an actress best remembered for her roles as precocious children in Now and Then, Sleepless in Seattle, and Uncle Buck, that meant playing a frequently naked, free-spirited hippie who hitches a ride with a bunch of strangers—Cera’s character and his friends— on their South American adventure.

When we met Cera and Hoffman last month on a patio in Beverly Hills to discuss Crystal Fairy, which was written and directed by Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Silva, both actors willingly discussed the weirdest things they’ve ever done with real-life strangers.

“I went with a girl I didn’t know to Fire Island,” Cera volunteered first. “She asked me kind of as a date, and I hadn’t been, so I said sure. She was nice enough, but then I realized that when we were walking around, I kept making this face, like [scowls], behind her back, so I realized that I probably was not feeling too great about it. Then when we were leaving, we missed the ferry like three times. We kept coming back as it was taking off, and I was literally like [reaches arms out and shouts], ‘No!’ We spent hours waiting to get off the island.

“I have not talked to her since,” he added. “But now that I am telling this story, I am a little worried that she will read it.”

“I proposed to a stranger,” Hoffman revealed, explaining that she’d once dated an Italian man who randomly complimented her on the street. Within months, Hoffman said, she proposed, although the relationship did not last. On the subject of European romances, Cera added that he had recently experimented in that area by dating a German girl.

Asked whether he speaks the language, he replied, “No, but I was ready to learn. I was prepared to buy land in Germany. It was that serious.” When pressed for more details, he politely demurred, “It’s too fresh.”

Both Cera and Hoffman were open, however, to discussing the mescaline they both took while filming a climactic scene in Crystal Fairy. Although she had two doses—the first, she told us, had no affect—Hoffman said that she was aware of her surroundings on set. “I was still present enough that I could step in and out of [the high], and take Sebastián’s feedback and use it in the scene,” she told us.

Hoffman’s performance is impressive not only because she executed part of it while under the influence of drugs but also because the actress had just two weeks to prepare for the role after Silva called her out of the blue and asked her to fly to Chile. When we wondered how she was able to “bare herself” in such a complex way, as she does exquisitely in the film’s final scenes, on such short notice, Hoffman cracked, “You mean, get naked? That doesn’t take much preparation. I can do that in a few seconds.”

“No, like you had all of these huge monologues prepared,” Cera pointed out, noting that the actors improvised freely around a 12-page script. Hoffman told us that she actually cribbed some ideas from the books of New Age writer Daniel Pinchbeck. Cera, meanwhile, did not require as many researched monologues, or as much mescaline, for that matter, as Hoffman did for the film.

“I didn’t take that much,” Cera told us. “I took about the equivalent of a—”
“Glass of chardonnay,” offered Hoffman. “Exactly, a glass of Chardonnay.”

While he did not get to experiment with drugs on set, the actor has had the chance to explore a darker, less likable side of himself in his last two films. In fact, in This Is The End, which opened last month, Cera plays such a repulsive, ass-slapping, cocaine-sniffing version of himself that at one point Danny McBride, who plays the de facto villain in the apocalyptic comedy, says, “Guess if Michael Cera’s dead, it’s not a total loss, right?”

When we asked how it felt to get in touch with his inner jerk, Cera deadpanned, “There wasn’t much excavating that needed to be done. It was all pretty much on the surface.”

At that point Hoffman burst out laughing, saying, “That is not even close to true. Michael Cera is the nicest human on the planet.”